God of War: Ascension Is An Uplifting Experience

Wow, Kratos sure is one angry dude. You’d think that eight years down the road and with six games under his belt Sony’s most iconic anti-hero since the PlayStation 2 era would have finally blown off some steam, or at least punched his way to total and utter exhaustion. Even David Jaffe, the franchise’s creator and well-known fan of all things gleeful and violent, admitted in an interview with Wired last year that he hoped whoever took over the reins of God of War could calm Kratos down a bit. And that’s exactly what developer Santa Monica studios promises to do on the back of Ascension’s box, introducing you to the first real God of War game in three years with the tagline, “Before he was a god, he was a man.”

But no. In God of War: Ascension, the new prequel to the core trilogy of God of War console games that was completed in 2010, Kratos is just as mad as he ever was. Maybe even more so. This is not a humanizing origin story like Crystal Dynamic’s excellent Tomb Raider reboot. God of War: Ascension may step backwards chronologically, but the story of God of War stopped making sense after the original game anyways. Time steps backwards in Ascension, but Kratos’ anger surges uncontrollably forward. Ever since narrative continuity was abandoned for the sake of the franchise’s continuity, God of War has basically been a game about punching things. And nobody knows how to do punching quite like Santa Monica.

God of War belongs in a sub-genre of videogames vaguely referred to as “hack and slash” or “beat ‘em up” games—games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta that emphasize fast-paced, highly stylized combat. But God of War has always stood out among its peers. Devil May Cry and Bayonetta’s protagonists are skinny and leather-clad wisecracking sharpshooters—they lead with their grace and finesse, skipping effortlessly away from their enemies’ attacks and chuckling self-assuredly while doing so. God of War combines the Japanese gaming sensibility of stringing together attack moves into rapid-fire colorful combinations with the thoroughly American sensibility of punching things. Like any good Arnold Schwarzenegger hero, Kratos is topless, glowering, and insanely buff. He doesn’t talk much, and I swear I’ve never seen him as much as crack a smile.

But this relentless anger is what makes Kratos one of the most perfectly realized characters in the history of video games. He is oppressively gloomy, so much so that players unfamiliar with his past might find his constant glower oppressive. But his endless torrents of rage mesh so immaculately with the game’s stellar combat that he doesn’t have to be anything but angry. Really, a happy Kratos would be the worst kind of Kratos. To play God of War is to be consumed by an overpowering emotion that’s both invigorating and frightening. Kratos is, to quote the writer David Wojnarowicz, “the physical equivalent of a scream.”

The perverse fun of playing God of War, therefore, has always come from the captivating experience of embodying such a tortured figure. Like “300,” God of War borrows from some heady arcane myths to craft a story chock-full of sex, intrigue, and, (of course) the occasional patricide. It doesn’t toe the line of historical narrative like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, it allows players to stomp across that line and kill every conceivable icon from Greco-Roman mythology. This would be completely ridiculous (and, I’ll admit, it still is pretty ridiculous) if the combat wasn’t balanced or designed well enough to back it up, but that’s always been God of War’s saving grace.

As Kratos, you wrestle with minotaurs, gargantuan cyclopses, and shrieking gorgons. Technically this is all elaborate swordplay (this is a “hack and slash” game, after all) done with the two swords Kratos has chained to his arms. But the gameplay has always felt more like scrappy bouts of fist fighting. The PlayStation’s DualShock controller vibrates with just the right amount of tension to feel the thud of every impact. As the game progresses, you unlock increasingly elaborate and acrobatic moves, but the combat never sacrifices this viscerally gritty charm.

Like many late-stage sequels and add-ons to an established franchise, Ascension makes only slight incremental adjustments to this essential paradigm. But unlike the hollow attempts at “innovation” in a game like Crysis 3, these changes are small enough to go practically unnoticed for longtime fans while still managing to make the gameplay feel all the more frantic and intriguing.

A lot of this improvement comes down to the way that Santa Monica reconfigured the way that players entered into semi-staged conflicts with mid-sized to gigantic enemies. God of War has occasionally been criticized for its overreliance on quick time events(QTEs)—short sequences of on-screen prompts that ask the player to press a series of buttons to complete an action like beheading some gigantic monster—that sacrifice the flexibility of player-controlled gameplay to allow for more elaborate setpieces. It may look cool to see Kratos hopping back and forth like Schwarzenegger in “Predator” to construct some impromptu device to behead a monster approximately 5,000 times his size. But if the player is only asked to press the x button every few seconds to pull of such an elaborate feat, the achievement ultimately feels empty. Ascension makes QTEs more engaging than previous God of War titles by requiring additional player action—instead of just pressing x repeatedly for Kratos to ensnare a gorgon, now he must dodge back and forth while she writhes ferociously in his grasp. It sounds like a small step, but it goes a long way.

Since embodying Kratos has always been the best part of God of War, adding multiplayer gameplay in Ascension was a peculiar choice for a late-stage sequel like this. If you could play as the god of war and duke it out with other deities across Mount Olympus, why would you want to stick around with mere humans? Kratos clearly wasn’t satisfied with his mortal trappings, but Santa Monica is hoping that its players will be with the four new multiplayer modes attached to the game.

The multiplayer modes, which range from team-based monster killing to all-out Super Smash Bros.-style brawls, are all simple fun that make use of many of the same excellent combat mechanics of the core single-player experience. It’s difficult to judge a multiplayer game before a community has had a chance to develop around it, but playing with these new toys still paled in comparison to playing with the main action figure.

God of War may not have anything resembling a logical single-player story anymore, but it still has one of the best characters the medium has ever created. He may be getting old, but he’s still as interesting and angry as ever. Hopefully Sony and Santa Monica won’t forget that when they bring Kratos (as they undoubtedly will) to the PlayStation 4.